The current pace of technological evolution presents the typical enterprise Information Technology (IT) organization with many opportunities and many challenges. On one hand, the availability of cost-effective, feature-rich, secure site-to-site wide area network (WAN) services provides enhanced capability to expand regionally, streamline operations, and take advantage of globalization opportunities. On the other hand, the increasing business reliance on these technologies creates a growing mandate for a practical solution to manage this new business asset.
Over the past quarter century technological innovations have so permeated the enterprise that, regardless of the size of organization, effectively all major business processes are fundamentally underpinned by business-critical networked applications. Additionally, highly affordable WAN services such as virtual private network (VPN) services including Virtual Leased Line (VLL), Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS) and IP VPN (Virtual Private Routed Network (VPRN)), have created an environment where even modest sized businesses can comfortably afford to connect discrete office locations and reap the operational benefits of centralizing business-critical networked applications over these reliable and secure connections.
While technologies to enable operators to offer affordable WAN services have evolved rapidly, techniques to manage them have not kept pace. Consider that most enterprises have little or no control over the performance of business applications provided over their WANs. These networked applications are often critically important to an enterprise; hence the impact of poor application performance can be substantial and often translates into lost business and/or higher operational costs.
Historically, application management solutions have been to deploy WAN management appliances at each site within a WAN—either by the enterprise themselves, independent of the operator, or through the operator as a managed service. The capital cost of these appliances, combined with the increased operational cost to manage them, effectively restricts this solution to all but the largest enterprises.
Although prioritization of networked application traffic can be a powerful management tool to an enterprise IT department, its implementation requires an understanding of the network operator's infrastructure, routes, paths, quality of service (QoS) management and queuing. However, in many cases a network operator may not want to share the details of its network with its enterprise customers.
Therefore, it would be desirable to have a cost-effective way for an enterprise to manage performance of its networked applications in a manner that does not require detailed knowledge of a network operator's infrastructure.